Staining the earth around him shades of rose. So that his brains went oozing out his nose Potcreeper dashed his head in with a boulder While Waterman, cold-blooded, grew yet colder. This, of course, leads to some adaptation of content (and to an increase in the number of verses to 374), but she never distances herself too much from the original, and the reader may be assured of finding intact all the glorious gore of the final combat. Stallings decided, in a declared “nod to” George Chapman’s 1624 translation, to format her verses in rhymed pentameter couplets. Nony Mouse on the metro tickets, were lost before transcription.Į. 11), which would discuss “more detailed parallels” (ibid.) with Homer. The only regret is the disappearance of the promised “notes to the poem itself” (p. All in all, it is a fitting and clear introduction to the Batrachomyomachia. It deals with narrative parallels in fable and epic, adds a short history of mice, weasels, and cats in Greek, Egyptian, and European art and literature, discusses the authorship and dating of the poem, analyses its verses (vocabulary and metrics), and enumerates some of its editions and English translations. ![]() Chesterton that Alice should not be taken “too seriously,” Martin Gardener nevertheless says that “no joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.” Thus, and keeping in mind its young readership, the introduction presents many learned pieces of information unexpected (by me, at least) in such an edition, but in a light, at times playful tone. Transcribed by Stallings, the found marginalia and pencil marks form the introduction and translation presented here.Īgreeing with G. 1) some metro tickets used as bookmarks, by an at first anonymous earlier reader soon discovered to be a mouse(!) conveniently called A. Stallings noticed “some tiny, tiny marginalia” written in pencil on its pages, and “some pencil marks scratched on” (p. The book opens with an apparent lampoon of Umberto Eco’s prologue to The Name of the Rose: examining a rare 1513 edition of the poem printed in Germany by fellow poet Thielemann Conradi, A. Chesterton’s opinion on Alice in Wonderland, the Batrachomyomachia is becoming “cold and monumental like a classic tomb” in the hands of scholars, who tend to forget that it was composed to be funny, and it “is a delightful but difficult enterprise to liberate from the custody” of the academy, “to try to recapture the first fresh careless rapture of the days when” it was composed. Scholars will find in its pages no new information on the poem or on the theories involving its composition, dating, genre, etc., but I nonetheless recommend the reading of it as a pleasant antidote to the excess of seriousness that affects some academic minds. It presents itself as a light, humorous introduction to this “diminutive, though not ridiculous, epic” (p. ![]() It must first be said that this edition is not aimed at the academy, but at a young public (which does not preclude an older readership). Stallings’ work is a delightful surprise. As a matter of fact, however, few of the new renderings preserve the poetic aspect of the original (even if a number of them respect a line-by-line textual correspondence), and in this aspect A. In Portuguese alone, at least four fresh translations and editions have appeared since 2001. In the last few decades, after a hiatus of about two centuries of limited interest, the Batrachomyomachia has gained renewed attention from scholars and poets alike, and a new edition and/or translation of it has been printed every two or three years. In fact, by 1744 Antonio Lavagnoli could already state that the number of translators of this short mock epic was almost equal to the number of its verses - which, if true, would amount to more than one translator per year. In subsequent years, be it as a preparation for the much more demanding translation of Homer, or as an amusing coda to it, or even as an independent enterprise, many scholars and poets undertook the task. ![]() Two Italian translations of the Batrachomyomachia were in circulation even before the publication of the editio princeps of its Greek text (perhaps in 1474), - one by Aurelio Simmaco de Iacobiti, the other by Giorgio Summariva. Contributors: Illustrated by Grant Silverstein.
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